The Mighty Red

By Louise Erdrich

Book Overview

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK - LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION - A FINALIST FOR THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR FICTION

"A sweeping, tender-hearted epic."--Harper's Bazaar

In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.

In the Red River Valley of North Dakota, several lives revolve around a wedding fraught with desire, jealousy, and uncertainty. Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed goth who can't read her own future but will settle for fulfilling his. Her best friend, Hugo, a gentle, red-haired, homeschooled giant, also loves Kismet and is determined to steal her away and build a life together. Kismet's mother, Crystal, drives a truck for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes in to the darkness of late-night radio, experiences visions of guardian angels, and worries about what's to come, for her daughter and herself.

The Mighty Red is Louise Erdrich at her consummate best. A novel of tender humor, disquietude, yearning, community, and family, it is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. Human time, deep time, Red River time, and geological time are explored alongside the impact of crises in our own time--climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the economic meltdown of 2008.

As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0063277050
• ISBN13: 9780063277052
• Release Date: October 2024
• Publisher: Harper
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.3" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Interesting & Descriptive!

Few chapters in, “this is an interesting book” came out of my mouth. I adore the chapter titles, the ease of chapter length, the telling of this story from the different points of view. I may be late to the review party on this one - but if this can give it an even greater boost, my job is done! Read this, seriously, go obtain this book in whatever fashion. You’ll appreciate the small town characters, the love triangle, the drama, the descriptive details of the houses and the town, the edge you sit on waiting to find out what all of this is pointing towards. Giving you more, little by little, but you realize you still aren’t sure where this is going. This is one of those books that will tempt you to keep reading past your bedtime or a bit over your lunch break time (not speaking from experience at all)! Very very very good!